More on LinuxToday

The Linux Kernel column #90 � the state of the kernel

"The past year has seen a lot of work on
enterprise-level features. This isn't too surprising as several of
the major vendors work on new products based around the 2.6.32
kernel. Among the new bits were performance enhancements (it's now
possible to apply more fine-grained limits on I/O bandwidth to
different running programs, thanks to the blkio cgroup I/O
controller work), scalability improvements (it's now possible to
use over 4,096 CPUs) and a huge amount of progress in the
virtualisation space. On that latter point, there were too many
developments to fully summarise, but they included an in-kernel
virtualised network server to aid performance, and new support for
detecting identical regions of memory in guest machines in order to
share a single copy, which can reduce overall memory usage
considerably.

"Embedded systems have seen a lot of action too. Support was
added for Intel's Moorsetown platform, which is x86-based but is
not compatible with the PC standard (it is intended for use in
low-power embedded gadgets). Thomas Gleixner aptly stated that this
indicated "the arrival of the embedded nightmare to arch/x86".
There was also the addition of new – and very aggressive
– power management features that allow for the selective
shutdown of buses that are not in use in order to save power, and
support for faster suspend and resume of the overall system through
parallelisation."